Maybe Japanese may eat better food on average because less inequality.
Maybe Scandinavians are more mild-mannered because of less inequality.
Race so strongly causes inequality that it should not have been mentioned as "another possible cause".

Why spread propaganda from the right as if the writers have to present both opinions and can't think for themselves? Reminds me of American media.

Whatever happened to a basic economic understanding from the Economist writers? You should take excess income and wealth away from those who are not using it to survive or to increase productivity, and invest the tax revenue into making the market more productive. If you don't, you're going to become the victim of countries that do. Of course rentiers should be taxed out of existence, and Brittany Spears doesn't need so much money that she stops performing to become a basket-case. Bill Gates didn't earn anything, but engaged in mass abuse of people by polluting the air, water, and land of the computer environment with inferior technology. I remember Macs and Unix in the 1980s. MS caught up in 1996, putting the computer world 5 years behind, despite the hardware being 10 times more powerful.

Americans at the lowest incomes working 40 to 60 hours a week have to pay 15% income tax directly and hidden through their employer, that does not go towards their health care, day care, social security, housing, mass transportation, postal system, telephone, electricity, military (financed by debt), or even local water and waste pick up in many cities. And yet Warren Buffet pays zero in taxes, and thinks giving $13 T in tax revenue to a bank system that placed everyone in rentier debt was a good idea. A system his income depends on.

The house bubble collapse was the best thing to happen to the U.S. in the past 50 years. And yet it was ruined with bailouts and the Economist doesn't understand this as well as the below-average American who was kind enough to avoid college and work for a living to actually support the economy. If workers could get the thinkers to stop thinking for a decade (where "thinking" in a high-gini index society is euphemistic for successfully defecting in a prisoners' dilemma game), then maybe people could work together for the greater good rather than reading pointless articles like this. Surely someone imaginative must be there.

It's not debatable anymore. It was figured out 150 years ago, even 300 years ago by some. A low gini index is a good thing, unless raping people through the wonderful legalities of a blind market is your cup of tea. Free market means freeing us from people like whoever wrote this article. It does not mean freely let the market create any gini index it wants.

I guess no one will argue that's how human beeing are (ate least 90% of them) ? I saw on "The Social Network" movie that Victoria Secret's founder sold his company to a private equity group some years ago for some USD100Million. Some years after that his company was worth USD2Billion, and he killed himself.

So isn't richness relative ? Oh yes it is. But the main point is that for smart people, equality meassurment does not come solely from "how much money have you got?", but also from how healthy are you, how prepared to contingencies are you and (much) more importantly, how good do you fell about YOURSELF (and not your neibour's new car).

I am surprised to see no mention of Hernstein & Murray's "The Bell Curve" which described this phenomenon 17 years ago. This stratification by intelligence has been ongoing since about the 1940s, starting with the widespread use of college admissions tests that are essentially IQ tests.

They show that in America (and presumably other industrial societies), low intelligence is strikingly correlated with poverty, single parenthood, welfare dependency, and various other negative outcomes, even after controlling for race and socioeconomic status of the parent. While in past ages your prospects may have depended mostly on what family you were born into, modern society is much more meritocratic, with "merit" essentially corresponding to the type of intelligence measured by standard IQ tests. These days you are much better off being born poor and smart than middle-class and dumb.

The troubling aspect of this is that in a modern industrial society, where obvious physiologic causes of low IQ such as malnutrition have been eliminated, there are no known interventions short of adoption at birth that have been shown to increase IQ long term. About 60-80% of IQ seems to be genetic, while the remainder is determined by aspects of the environment that we are absolutely clueless to understand, let alone change. There have been numerous attempts over the last 40 years to increase IQ, such as the Head Start program in America, and all have been failures. The bottom line is that while increasing IQ on a long term basis through environmental interventions might theoretically be possible, we have no idea how to do it, and possibly never will.

The rise of cognitive elites takes place in emerging markets mainly. The leaders of North American nations created corrupted dynasties, for example the George W. Bush family in the USA; Paul Martin family in Ontario, Canada; Dalton McGuinty family in Ontario, Canada, which misgoverned the USA and Canada and led to the deep economic and financial crisis in North America.
Viktor O. Ledenyov, Ukraine

The patent offices of the U.S. & Canada are backlogged and seem to lack inventiveness toward solving their problems. Canada’s patent office fails to set a fast-track for “green” inventions, believing any sufficiently vague definition of “green” would be abused to expedite eco-insensitive patents. Meanwhile, patent attorneys find wherewithal to grant FaceBook TM rights to “face” (2010), or enforce Amazon.com’s 1999 patent on “one-click purchasing” (U.S. patent 5960411). Even industrial legislation fails; Russian Dmitri Sklyarov was arrested in 2001 breaking encryption on Adobe Soft’s “PDF” format, under U.S. DMCA stating “No person shall... descramble a scrambled work” if not the intended recipient (DMCA, §1201). Adobe employed laughably breakable encryption, but DMCA’s definition of “scramble” is sufficiently vague that they find protection under its coverage; Adobe dropped the charges and continued using the same encryption, failing to show an interest in reality. Considering, then, that patent and other legal-bureau systems (even intent on utopian designs) can come to serve representation of no more than white-collared greed and lethargy, realistically, national patent activities don't “indicate” anything.

One thing the author neglects to mention is that the secret of any invention is replacement. The clear purpose of industry is to replace human necessity, manufacturing losses of the need to work, to move, or to think. Peruse your favorite devices, search for an exception. Arguably, measuring innovation by patent is in order with measuring a nation’s well-being by its economy (which is entirely based on its industry) and not its physical health (typically, inversely proportionate to its industrial throughput). So, small wonder that America is securely the wealthiest nation which is also–far and above– the stupidest and unhealthiest, much thanks to figures and analyses.

"[Innovation] as measured by patents earned per person”. Ridiculous figure to start, as patents are supposed to represent individual properties (one set of objective traits) and in “Spirit Level” they're divvied per-capita, entirely anonymous, collective & not proprietary at all (entirely different set of traits).

Of course, “Spirit Level” is right that with more economic equality you find more social stability. However, you also find statements reflecting contentment and well-being in North Korea or Communist-enslaved Tibet where there is arguably no lack of efforts toward economic equality across persons, total effacement of individuality in pursuit of crass and smug idealism based on some figures.

And hidden income: how are the heralded Genie figures at manifesting multiple, entire classes of hidden accounts? Business is by nature private; nothing any human being can do about it.

“Striving against natural order is loss-inducing” – why isn’t that in the book, its counter-arguments, or the article? It answers the why and the how of equality producing better results: nature creates all monadic self-interest in equal light even if it doesn’t really create all people physically or intellectually equal. If you fight against that force of nature, then you have to put up a hell of a fight, lowering your life expectancy and comfort, and creating a world that you don’t want to really live in.

The more intelligent persons tend to reproduce less frequently. I think there’s something reptilian that kicks in when elbow room is low (as it is in agricultural civilizations with their dense and explosive populations) and if you have intellect it says “don’t reproduce, it’s bad for the species and for your offspring and yourself”, and if you don’t have intellect it says “reproduce freely, it’s your only chance to niche your genes into the species while resources are dwindling and competition is increasing”. The ignorant reproduce the most. This has been well-known since the early late 19th century.

Who would miss who? The ignorant and intelligent rarely mingle or get along. Their relationship is more like two parasites fighting for space to bloat into than symbiotic stewards of the planet gracefully correcting the group dynamic normalizing functions of blah, blah, blah, unto Utopia. The reproductively liberal “ignorant” obviously don’t care; they’ll probably cannibalize the financiers first. It’s the stuffy “thinkers” who feel like they’ll miss themselves when they’re bred and bullied out of the picture.

The American Eugenic Society founded on attempts to curb these trends and look where it got them. Now they’re relegated to the role of “planned parenthood”, mired in the religious- and spiritual-level trouble of the abortion debate. Let’s not forget they directly inspired Hitler’s death machine. And, remember, he called it business. It was for the sake of his economic figures. His opposition, the victors, sought to call it war.

"Mr Wilkinson and Ms Pickett suggest that equal societies fare better because humans evolved in small groups of hunter-gatherers who shared food. Modern, unequal societies are hugely stressful because they violate people’s hard-wired sense of fairness. The authors call for stiffer taxes on the rich and more co-operative ownership of companies."

Did they really infer that we need stiffer taxes and more co-operative ownership because of hard-wired fairness because of hunter-gatherer societies?

If our moral yardstick is going to be the hard-wired fairness of hunter-gatherer societies - assuming, that is, that you even know what you're talking about - then I can think more relevant progressive reform, such as murder, rape, plunder, disease, misogyny, illiteracy, and infant mortality for starters.

"In America, for example, in 1987 the top 1% of taxpayers received 12.3% of all pre-tax income. Twenty years later their share, at 23.5%, was nearly twice as large. The bottom half’s share fell from 15.6% to 12.2% over the same period."

This is kind of skewed because 20 years later the amount of pre-tax income is enormously larger, which I realize means even more for the top 1%, but also means 12.2% for the bottom half's share in 2007 is probably far larger than 15.6% in 1987. Anyways, seemed a bit confusing when I casually read that and it wasn't fully layed out. Also those numbers would be alot smaller for the 1% if your figure was post-tax instead of pre-tax, which of course is what the 1% are really getting.

"...a (equally) rising tide (equally) lifts all boats"
We all live only a finite period of time. The good or bad we do ourselves effects everyone. Equality or lack of it does matter. The clever may inherit the earth, but it will be a less pleasant place overall for everyone--even the clever--if they have any conscience.